Knowledge Brings Fear

Realzeit

Today was this day of the year again. Driven by collective stupidity and the obvious will to suffer, all of Europe plunged into a one-hour jet-lag again. The so called "daylight saving" never fails to leave me in a grumpy, aggressive mood, and obviously not only me.

Some years ago I set about to change something and invented the Campaign for RealTime . The goal is to have a plebiscite to decide which timezone Germany should check in. Since the "daylight saving" is just a temporary shift of time zone and the effects are not that bad, there are good arguments to have "permanent daylight saving time". But there are also good arguments against that, so a plebiscite is the right thing to do.

The arguments why on and off daylight saving is useless and economically damaging are well known and well documented. Accident numbers are rising measurable, people are tired for weeks and the originally promised energy saving does not occur. To the contrary, the overall effects on the economy are negative. Even France, who introduced the stupid idea back then, is now willing to stop the nonsense, but apparently the southern european countries want to continue for tourism reasons. Get real, just switch time zones...

Suits & Ties

Forced by business / job necessities, I need to move incognito inside the world of suits & ties from time to time now. Never having submitted myself to the "standard" dress code before, I encountered some knowledge that I did not need until now. I felt a bit like an anthropologist camouflaging as a ape to study the habits of an unknown herd of strange apes. As always, when I am on a fearless expedition into realms of the unknown, I will try to note the more interesting bits here.

First: its not the tie, it is the collar of the shirt that threatens breathing and blood circulation. The tie can always be tricked into not strangling you, but too small shirts are unavoidable deadly. Shirts sizes are commonly specified by the girth of the neck in centimeters, which determines how wide the collar is. Surprisingly, this trivial measurement seems to provide sufficiently good information on the overall dimensions of the rest of the torso, to produce a more or less fitting shirt. People who are playing this game for years, strongly recommended to buy one size wider then the actual girth measurement, thereby avoiding to be suffocated by the collar. I am glad I followed the advice.

Second: binding a tie is, above all other things, a question of training. It is the same principle as with difficult seamen knots. Actually, the instruction graphics on the different ways to tie a tie look exactly the same as the ones in maritime instruction books. The best looking tie knots are also the most complicated to master. To be able to tie even a relatively simple knot took me about a hour of training in front of the mirror. Of course I wanted to be able to do it quickly and in a way that does not look or feel bad, everything else would have been useless. So if you are about to wear a tie for the first time in your life, plan for some long awkward moments in front of the mirror. Forget dressing up without a mirror. It seems to be possible with a lot of experience and training, but certainly not for the novice. The scientific literature insists that ties go faster out of fashion then suits, so it seems to be advisable to not use ties older then a few years.

The option for cheaters is to ask someone "in the know" to help. In emergency situations, the best and least embarrassing way to a perfectly bound tie is to walk fully dressed but with a unbound tie into a tie or mens fashion shop, and politely ask the salesperson for help. The two times when was forced to do this (reluctantly of course, who likes to be defeated by a simple freeform geometry problem...), the shop attendants were used to the situation and helped without any fuss or humiliating comments.

The third thing that struck me hard is how much time and money you need to spend on maintaining the stuff. Shirts and ties need to be constantly cleaned and ironed after one use, suits chemically dry cleaned not too seldom, shoes need to be polished and always stored with a Schuhspanner after use. All the clothes need to be stored on appropriate hangers, carefully aligned so not to cause crumples. When you are used to high-tech fabrics that are very easy to maintain, also look ok when crumpled and are nearly dry by itself when coming out of the washing machine, this is quite a nasty surprise. Without a complete service infrastructure, the job of maintaining a full business drag is too time consuming to consider.

Today, while being filmed for a product video dressed in shirt and tie, I heard a good explanation for all this high-maintenance clothing circus. It goes like this: If you are able to join the game and wear impractical high-maintenance clothes, you implicitly show that you have time and money to spend, way beyond mere survival.
This also neatly explains why all these big business honchos and politicos in TV often have a very complicated, but smooth looking tie-knot. It is all about status and showing how important you are. "Clothes make people" is still valid.

The truth is (I seriously hate admitting it), that wearing an obviously good / expensive set of costume massively changes the behavior of many people towards me. They listen from the first sentence, not only after I said something smart five times. I get better hotel rooms for the same price, have less trouble at airports and experience more implicit trust by other people wearing these costumes. I could really get used to that. It is like reaping the rewards for having joined the not-so-secret brotherhood of those who bent over deeply. "Join our silly world of rank and status games and you will be rewarded with attention and not be treated like some strange animal. Come on, brother. Everybody is doing it!".

So if, by accident, you happen to meet me in full drag, always remember that somewhere inside the monkey costume the anthropologist is lurking. (Cue in evil laughter here, fading off into the distance.)

legal tender

Traveling a bit around in Europe (today its grey old Amsterdam again) I noticed that the forgery of high denomination Euro notes seems to have become endemic. Nearly every small shop here has signs up that they do not accept notes above 50€. Obviously the technology gap between the money printers and the money forgers has become so narrow again, that to the untrained eye forgeries are not recognizable. The printers now attempt to put detection technology into photocopy machines and scanners to prevent them from being used to copy money. This effort looks like it has been designed to ward off the little joe who has the brilliant idea to duplicate his salary on the office copy-machine. It will for sure not stop professional forgers.

When the Euro had been introduced the European Central bank bragged about the multiple hidden security features embedded into the higher denomination bills, and that they would release the information how to use the security features only if required due to rising forgeries. It looks like the time to show their hand will arrive this year, and I am really curious what they have in their back hand. The euro notes have an overall high rotation rate, meaning that they arrive pretty often at the central banks. So there is a good chance that forgeries are detected and removed from circulation, if systematic tests are being performed at the banks. The forgeries found are still a small number of the total cash in circulation. Ca. 8 billion Euro notes with a total face value of 415 billion € are in circulation. Notes removed from circulation were 311925 in the last half year of 2003. The ECB has a quite good press policy, reporting all kinds of statistics like number and kind of counterfeit Euro notes every half year. I took the statistics of the last two years and generated a interesting little chart showing the total counterfeit numbers of each note taken out of circulation. Clearly the 50 Euro note is by far the most heavily forged one, with the €20 catching up.

So declining to accept high denomination bills will probably not protect the shop owners in a strictly statistical sense, only by avoiding to be stuck with a days worth of revenue in the form of a counterfeit 500€ note. The total numbers are clearly rising, by about 30% each half year.

mad world

I noticed that a rather unlinkely piece of music has become very popular. It somehow seems to reflect the mood of the time, the absurdity of it all. First I heard it today in the taxi to the train station in the morning, then in the super market in a different train station and later in a small restaurant. I only knew that the song belonged very much to the movie Donnie Darko (which I still find puzzling and fascinating). Luckily, Tina (who blogs at machinereadable ) knew immediately which song it was: Mad World. The original seems to be from Tears for Fears, way back in 1982. It was then right in the middle of nuclear war fear, looming ecological catastrophe and general "the end of world is only a matter of time" mood. The lyrics is still very fitting for today, the music is now from Gary Jules and I still don't know if I like the original or the new version better. The lyrics were so perfect for the situation in the morning. People run around in circles...

RFID in money errors

There are reports on various sites in the net that US $20 bills contain RFIDs. The "evidence" presented was that the bill caused anti-theft systems to sound the alarm and got burn-marks in the microwave.

It is rather obvious that this is nonsense. A bit of knowledge on how microwaves, RFIDs and anti-theft-systems work comes useful here. Lets begin with the anti-theft systems.

The simplest class of anti-theft systems works by measuring the drain on a HF field generator that is caused by introducing a resonant antenna into the field. The antenna is in the small tag thats placed on the protected products. There are various other kind of anti-theft systems, but these are quite frequent. The alarm goes invariably on if something suffiently resonant is in the field. Resonance can also be caused by a simple strip of metal, wire, metallized foil or pattern of conductive ink that has the right measurements.

The new $20 bills apparently does not contain a metal strip like the Euro bills. At least thats what I gather from the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing . The thread on Slashdot suggests that the metal components in the ink of the new bills cause a sufficiently good antenna when stacked. Single bills got no burnmarks.

For research purposes I microwaved a 5 Euro note and got the expected effect. Within a few seconds little sparks where visible on the metal stripe and on the metal printing on the right side and caused the expected burnmarks. From analyzing the note under a microscope it is clear that no RFID is in the Euro note. So much for debunking the "when microwaving makes burnmarks, it must be RFID" myth.

Now, for the "what if" department. Suggested reading for understanding the RFID-field is the RFID Handbook . RFIDs in money would need to solve one of the most critical problems of deploying tags into flexible materials in rough environments: how to bond the antenna to the actual chip. As far as I know this has not yet been done with sufficient robustness.

For destroying RFIDs in money, microwaving is not the brightest of all ideas. As we have seen above, it may damage the money visibly. The microwave frequency of 2.4 GHz is not optimally suited for coupling most of the radio energy into the antenna of lower frequency RFID tags. Of course some energy is coupled in, possibly enough to destroy the tag. But you risk damaging the money because a lot of energy is coupled in where you don't want it. Also, for food processing and other applications, microwave resistant tags are under development. So it cant be ruled out that the RFID in money will be microwave resistant at least to a certain point.

A more clever idea would be to use precisely the same frequency (or a half-wave of it) as the reader devices and just use much more power to couple enough energy into the tag to destroy the bond wires from chip to antenna. This will most probably not result in burn marks and cause no visible damage.

If the tag is placed always on the same position, just stamp it out with a hollow needle (like from a hypodermic syringe). This low-tech technique just leaves a small hole.

The interesting aspect is that RFID has already made it so much into the collective mind that the story was not rejected as bogus out of hand. This is somehow good, as public awareness tends to dampen the most excessive technology intrusions into real life.

What amused me to no end was the news that the US Department of Defense mandates RFID in all goods in purchases. I just wait for the news that some chinese or russian ammunitions vendor announces RFID-aware landmines. Would make the friend/foe distinction much simpler. Just explode if an enemy combat boot RFID tag is detected...

Also, placing RFID tags into personal identification documents like passports enables a completely new method of high-tech terrorism. Assassinating someone just requires replacing the doorsteps of some public places the person visits from time to time. The doorstep just waits for the right passport to come by before exploding. But thats probably collateral damage that must be tolerated so we all can feel more secure.

Verpeilen im industriellen Maßstab

Verpeilertum lohnt sich wieder! Das ist die klare Ansage die man aus den letzten Wochen Presselektüre gewinnen muss. Natürlich gilt auch hier wieder das Jürgen-Schneider-Prinzip: ist der Kredit erst gross genug ist er nicht das Problem des Borgenden sondern das Problem der Bank. Da nun die allseits bekannten und beliebten Grosskonzerne Deutschlands nicht kleckern sondern klotzen, betreiben sie das Projektverpeilen natürlich auch im Industriemaßstab.

Die Maut - für jeden der nur einmal an einem halbwegs komplexen Projekt teilnahm war von vornherein klar das das nix werden kann. Nicht in dieser kurzen Zeit und mit dieser Struktur. Trotzdem wurde unterschrieben weil man die Politik nicht ärgern wollte und man darauf rechnen durfte im Ernstfall nicht hängen gelassen zu werden. So kam es dann auch. Und ganz nebenbei wird daraus auch noch die flächendeckende Überwachungsstruktur für den Autoverkehr.

Der virtuelle Arbeitsmarkt - früher hätte man wohl "datenbankbasierter Webserver" gesagt - nur läppische 165 Millionen Euro Steuergelder durch den Schornstein, per kaum zu kündigendem Vertrag. Ach nein, nicht durch den Schornstein sondern zu einer Firma die sich schon häufiger durch Spezialexpertentum beim Projekte verzappeln, umfangreiche Sicherheitsignoranzkompetenz und Kostenexpansion ausgezeichnet hat. Das Geld ist ja nicht weg, es ist nur woanders. Im Zweifel beim Herrenausstatter der die wohlkrawattierten Consultants betucht.

Das Finanzamt - eine meiner liebsten Behörden - verpeilt mal locker 13 Jahre lang vor sich hin um ein Stück Software zu bauen das dann weggeworfen werden muss. Bestimmt auch mit Hilfe von hochgradig fähigen Berater-Experten.

Schaut sich eigentlich niemand bei den Ausschreibungskomitees an was die Auftragnehmer vorher schon so vergeigt haben und warum? Ich kaufe doch auch keinen Gebrauchtwagen bei einem Händler der zwar gut angezogen ist aber meinem Freund einen Wagen mit kaputtem Getriebe angedreht hat. Ausgerechnet die Beraterlinge die immer von "Objektivierung" und "faktenbasierten Entscheidungen" daherreden scheinen eigentlich nur noch unter massivem Einsatz von Reality Distortion Fields Aufträge ergattern zu können, weil ihre Projektgeschichten ja kaum als Werbung dienen. Ganz abgesehen davon das so ein Behördenleiter kaum die Erfahrung haben dürfte das Anforderungsmanagement für ein Software-Grossprojekt durchzuziehen oder zu beurteilen was da eigentlich abgeht und was er wirklich beauftragt...

Irgendwie klingt das alles so wie es kommen musste wenn Politik und Behörden mit dem ohnehin schon komplexen Thema Software-Grossprojektmanagement konfrontiert werden. Ich weiss leider nicht wie das in anderen Ländern so geht, aber bisher habe ich in Deutschland noch kein einziges erfolgreiches "Public-Private-Partnership"-Projekt gesehn das über Gebäudereinigung hinausging.

Bruce Sterling schrieb in "Tommorow Now" das es bei Politik heutzutage nur noch darum ginge die Technokraten, die dafür sorgen das die Infrastruktur funktioniert, davor zu beschützen von den Fanatikern und Bizzarren verdrängt zu werden. Ich glaube er hat die Idioten vergessen...